Keyword Selection

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Niche selection and Keyword selection are the foundations of a site which will rank highly in the search engines and attract relevant traffic. We've looked at Niche selection, now we're moving on to find the keywords in our niche that we can target. We'll continue with our Bass fishing niche. I'm going to build a bass fishing site, even though I know nothing about the subject.

Now we need to do some keyword research on Bass Fishing, first, I'll show you how to do it for free, then I'll show you how to do it using the various keyword research tools that i pay for.

So lets head over to the Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool again

We can clearly see that the phrase "bass fishing" is searched for more times than any other related term with 809 searches today. Then we have a couple of terms related to bass fishing games which might represent a seperate sub-niche, followed by bass fishing lures, bass fishing tips etc ...

Ten years ago you could have published a site on bass fishing and attracted plenty of traffic. Today, almost every niche has a lot of competing web pages.

Would you rather compete against 1000 other pages, or a million? for first page of Google?

The answer is obvious, but we now need to find out how much competition we have ...

Let's head over to google and find out ...

This is how most people search, entering the term bass fishing in Google. The number of results returned is 239,000 - that means that there are 239,000 pages that contain both the words "fishing" and "bass" in ANY ORDER. To find the number of pages that are optimised for the keyphrase bass fishing, type the keyphrase into Google in quotes, like this - "bass fishing". You'll find that there are now 235,000 competing results. That's unusual, you'll frequently find that the number of pages that are optimised for a particular phrase is considerably lower than the first search without quotes. It's probably because it's only a two word phrase.

On the subject of keyword phrases, do you know what percentage of keyword phrases are two word phrases? three word phrases? longer phrases?

At November 2007, Amsterdam based research firm Amstat gave the following numbers:

• 1 Word 15.2%
• 2 Words 31.9%
• 3 Words 27%
• 4 Words 14.8%
• 5 Words 6.5%
• 6 Words 2.7%
• 7 Words 1.1%
• 8 Words 0.3%
• 9 Words 0.2%
• 10 Words 0.1%

The suggestion is then, that you should target keyword phrases from 2 to 4 words if possible (one word phrases are extremely difficult to rank for).

So, would targetting the phrase "bass fishing" be a sensible option? Ordinarily I'd say no, and in general, you want less than 50,000 results in Google as competition, perhaps 100,000 as a maximum if your promotion activites are good.

But that's not the end of the story. It makes sense to analyse the result on the first page of Google, to see how stiff the competition is. This is where you could go badly wrong, and waste a huge amount of time, let me explain ...

The majority of search engine traffic is currently from the USA at 22% of global searches (followed by China at 10%, Japan at 9%, Germany at 6%, and the UK at 5%). However I live in the UK, and the search results served up to me have a UK bias, in fact each countries' search results will have this country specific bias. This means that people around the world see different results on the first page of the search engines. 

Why is this important?

The figures show that I should get almost four times the number of US visitors than UK visitors, so if my website topic has global popularity, it makes sense to analyse the competition in the US, and not the UK.

Analysing the UK results (that's using the "search the web" radio button, and not "search pages from the UK") show that the PR of the top ten ranked pages on Google for the keyphrase "bass fishing" without the quotes, ranges from 0-3, and that the number of backlinks varies from 0 to 70.

If I assumed that this really was the global competition, I would actually target the keyphrase as I know that I could beat a number of those pages for ranking.

However, checking the US results gives PR's in the range 3-6, and backlinks of 8 - 18,300 ... and that's not something that I want to compete with ... there are easier targets.     

You can find details of Nichebot here

You can find details of Wordtracker below